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After two decades of obscurity, all it took was a few choice roles to get noticed—a Nazi infiltrator here, an X-Men villain there, plus one unforgettable turn in Shame that made him a full-frontal phenomenon. His rapid rise continues this month with Ridley Scott's Alien prequel, Prometheus. But as Chris Heath discovers, Michael Fassbender is more than the sum of his parts

If he’s going to take me home with him, Michael Fassbender first needs a moment alone. That’s the one thing he asks. We’ve been walking and talking for a while in a local park, but he didn’t even mention that we were close by his apartment until the increasingly heavy rain triggered his sense of hospitality. "Just give me two seconds to do a little bit of a sort of tidy-up," he requests. "My mother wouldn’t be happy."

I wait in the stairwell, glad just to be getting no wetter, until he swings open the door.

"Okay!" he beams. "Welcome to my flat!"

Perhaps the hillside mansions, penthouse duples, lakeside haciendas, and beachfront idylls will follow in the traditional movie-star way, but for now these three rooms—this big one we are in, a small bedroom at the back with bedding on the verge of tumbling out the open door, and an unseen bathroom—are the only ones in the world Michael Fassbender can call his own. "For one person, it’s perfect, really," he says. Although some areas of East London have become hyperfashionable in recent years, this is not one of them. He moved to this apartment in 2006, at the end of his twenties, when he was just one more actor getting enough work to live off but still wondering whether that chance would ever come to show the world what he could really do. Since his recent breathless ascent, he has had neither the time nor the inclination to move. "I always liked the energy round here. Traditionally more of a working-class area. A bit of an edginess to it, as well. And the parks are everywhere here. I always just felt like this was the right spot for me."

Fassbender directs me to a perch near a small raised tabletop—"nice little congregation spot"—and offers me a choice of drinks: champagne, beer, tea. It’s the early afternoon, and this is the first time we’ve met, so tea seems most prudent. He opens the fridge. "The milk is just on the edge," he cheerily announces, as though every kind of luck is with us.

He points out the stains and bubbling paint on the ceiling where he’s had serious water leakage, only recently fid, and the similarly buckled floor below. Soon he’ll have it all redecorated, move a wall at the same time. "As you can see," he says, "I need storage space."

I can see. Large areas of the floor are covered: bos, suitcases, clothes, two guitars, one electric with its amplifier. Suits lie and hang everywhere, evidence of an actor promoting three films simultaneously (Shame, A Dangerous Method, and Haywire)—part of a manic two-year flurry of work which also included his role as Magneto in X-Men: First Class, a remake of Jane Eyre, and the forthcoming Ridley Scott science fiction extravaganza, Prometheus—someone sometimes only home for a few hours before having to head out to the next premiere, film festival, or awards ceremony.

Though perhaps it has always looked like this. Fassbender mentions the time during the Shame shoot when the director, Steve McQueen, visited his temporary New York home. "It’s incredible," he remembers McQueen saying. "It’s exactly the same mess pattern." Fassbender tells me that when he was young, and his parents were busy running a hotel, he was responsible for lots of the cleaning at home. That was how he got pocket money. "My mother was very particular about checking," he says, and mimes running a finger across a surface to check for dust. "No shortcuts allowed." I’m not sure whether he’s telling me this to explain why things aren’t cleaner or why they aren’t messier.

In the middle of the room is a mini Ping-Pong table, borrowed from his British agent, who lives nearby. "Now that it’s here," says Fassbender, "it’s not going. This table has been the best contribution for fun I’ve had in a long time. This table has seen some action..." He pauses, laughs. "That sounds wrong."

But has it? I say, gently pushing.

"Just the paddles," he deflects, and of course he then realizes that this sounds wrong, too, in exactly the same way.

No matter. Just an inconsequential bit of innuendo. Except that right now, and ever since the release of Shame, I’m not sure that in the life of Michael Fassbender there is such a thing as an inconsequential bit of innuendo. For every person who actually saw the movie, and Fassbender’s monumental, unflinching portrayal of a man lost in the abyss of his unappeasable sexual appetite, there are dozens more who only know it as the movie in which he shows absolutely everything. And so, for the past few months Fassbender has been cast adrift in a shoreless ocean of innuendo. It has been relentless. He has been required to smile through endless hilarious penis-joke interviews. (Here’s a representative example, from the prime-time British boys-and-cars TV show Top Gear: "You had to do, let’s be honest, a full-frontal nude scene—was it hard?" Next, the pithy follow-up remark: "I mean, this was an impressive sausage....") He has been required to grin appreciatively at playful public mockery from his peers. (Most notably, George Clooney’s speech at this year’s Golden Globes: "Michael, honestly, you can play golf...with your hands behind your back.") And he has been required—this really happened—to identify a series of screen shots of famous penises in the movies. (Twice. Both times on MTV. The second time while standing on an awards-show red carpet.)

All of this he has done with apparent good humor, at least if you don’t try to read too much into his body language or the way his eyes shift or the flickering edges of his smile. Next to all that, what’s a gentle double entendre about sex on a very small Ping-Pong table? Go with it.

"Paddles," he repeats. "And balls."

And he grins, exactly as you would grin if you found this funny, though it’s easy to understand why he also says, "So it starts."

In his midteens what Michael Fassbender wanted most of all was to be a heavy-metal guitarist. With glee he talks about his youthful favorites: Metallica’s "Orion," Sepultura’s "Beneath the Remains," anything off Slayer’s Reign in Blood. He fetches his iPad and searches for his favorite Slayer songs on YouTube. When "Seasons in the Abyss" begins, he talks about how sensational the drummer is—"This bit here, I love this bit!"—until the riffage kicks in and he begins to play frantic air guitar, grinning. He shows me his book of Alice in Chains sheet music and tells me how hard it was to learn Megadeth’s "Rust in Peace." "Dave Mustaine, he seemed to really pick difficult timings. I think he sometimes made things a bit more complicated than they needed to be."

Back then, Fassbender looked the part. "I had long hair, down to here..." he says, holding his hand level with his chest, "...ten-hole Doc Martens, and combat shorts cut at the knee." He and his friend Mike had a band, but they could never find a drummer or a bass player, and their only concert, in a local pub at the middle of the day, was just the two of them. It wasn’t a triumph. They kept being asked to turn down the volume, lower and lower. "Nobody wants to hear Metallica at lunchtime," he says.

It took him a while to realize that he would never be good enough. He needed a new plan. "As a teenager, you’re searching for something that fits for you. I was pretty average at most things. I was just looking for something that I could relate to and perhaps excel in myself." That turned out to be acting.

Fassbender’s first TV job was in a British comedy called Hearts & Bones—he played a boyfriend known as Herman the German who liked to carry around a snorkel. (Fassbender was born in Germany and has a German father, though from the age of 2 he grew up in Ireland, his mother’s homeland.) Sometimes, when you see future movie stars in their first small roles, the glow of what they will become dazzles you. But this isn’t like that. The young Michael Fassbender seems significantly more inconsequential and less attractive than the famous one. It’s totally plausible on-screen when he makes a case to a girl that they should be together because "neither of us are aggressively good-looking."

A year out of drama school, he got what seemed like his big break when he was cast in the HBO World War II series Band of Brothers. He spent nine months on-set only to discover the cruel difference between being on-camera day after day and being visible in the finished work. "Blink," he says, "and you’ll miss me." Several months in Los Angeles brought more rejection. "I wasn’t blowing them away in the audition room, that’s for sure," he says. "I just didn’t feel settled or comfortable or confident." He retreated to London and spent much of the next few years on British TV, and though the roles got bigger over time, and he always seemed to occupy them with élan, he still didn’t radiate anything remarkable.

But Fassbender says that when 2007 arrived, he somehow knew. "There was something funny about that year," he says. "I realized that year somebody left the door open. I’m kind of superstitious—I was born in 1977, it was 2007. I just felt something in my bones."

Nonetheless, the opportunity of Fassbender’s life nearly slipped him by. He was asked to meet with the English artist Steve McQueen, who was planning to make his first film, Hunger, about the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, who starved himself to death in 1981 as a protest against the British authorities. Fassbender and McQueen didn’t hit it off. Fassbender was wary about how anyone would handle such an important and emotive episode in Irish history. McQueen simply didn’t like the man he met. He thought Fassbender was cocky.

McQueen’s casting director persuaded him to meet Fassbender a second time, and they both saw what they had previously missed. "I was like, This guy is what I’ve been looking for for so long," says Fassbender. "You’re looking for that guy or woman who’s really going to elevate you and push you in the right ways and really get something out of you that you wouldn’t be able to achieve yourself."

There is a tendency, as with Shame, to reduce what Fassbender did in Hunger to one specific physical feat, in this case starving himself so that he could act out the final scenes weighing only 128 pounds. Dropping the weight required daunting commitment and self-control, and the result of these efforts is terrifying, bleak, and heartbreaking: a man forcing his own body to wither so far that soon there will no longer be room for a person inside it. But what Fassbender does in Hunger far transcends that. For the first time, he marshals the union of otherworldly intensity, naturalism, and serene command that he has brought to a wildly diverse range of roles since. At one point there is a single uninterrupted camera shot that lasts for over seventeen minutes—a scene where he debates the path ahead with a skeptical priest, just two men talking—but if I hadn’t read that it was a single shot, I don’t think I would have noticed anything but what they said.*

Whether it was more that Hunger sparked something within Fassbender, or whether it simply alerted the film world that here was an actor who could do so much more than had yet been asked of him, after that one role everything seemed different. He could be equally entrancing as a weak-willed charmer in a low-budget British domestic drama (in the very fine Fish Tank) or as an iconic comic-book character in a blockbuster (in X-Men: First Class, with his sinister humanization of the young Magneto). Perhaps best of all was his brief, majestic turn in Tarantino’s_ Inglourious Basterds,_ where Fassbender made it seem as though it had always been the case that he could drop into a movie for less than half an hour and deliver a performance of such precision and charisma that no one would forget it.

Though it was well-reviewed and much discussed, Shame was not a widely watched box-office hit. And despite its raw subject matter, it is not in the least a titillating film. Also, while Fassbender is very visibly naked in the movie, he is, of course, far from the first male actor to appear this way. So why has his nudity inspired such attention, so much blinkered focus and giggly merriment?

I’d suggest that the main reason, if we’re being honest, is a simple one, and relates to the surreal, feverish totemization of penis size in our culture: People feel free to harp on about someone’s penis as though this is not insulting or inappropriate because, if that penis is sufficiently large,_ any_ reference to it is, by default, flattering. (Were he possessed of "an unimpressive sausage," so to speak, far less would have been said.) This is why each time Fassbender’s role in Shame is reduced to a simple act of undressing, no one seems to worry that it’s an insult to everything else he did in the movie: He has a big dick, so he’s got nothing to be unhappy about and every reason to smile at anything we might say on the subject. I think it really may be that idiotic.

* _ Incidentally, Fassbender was just as naked in Hunger as he would be in Shame, if only fleetingly. No one ever seems to mention that. I suppose that when a prisoner in the last few months of his life is being forcibly stripped and hosed down, dick jokes don’t seem quite so funny_

Maybe there’s also something in Fassbender’s manner—the happy-go-lucky Irish charmer—that has reassured people that it’s okay. One of the things I will find myself wondering as I spend time with Fassbender is how true this is: whether his easygoing, chuckling demeanor at moments like this reflects a similar easygoingness inside—or whether, buried deep behind those sparkly eyes, there’s actually a whirlpool of fury and disdain and hurt at how it feels when you give your all for the type of performance that might define a career only to find it routinely reduced to a series of jokes about your genitalia, jokes that you are not only expected to tolerate but to laugh along with, and not only that but also to congratulate each new joker for his or her epic wit.

"It’s fun to a point," he says of these situations he has been facing, "and after a certain point you worry that it kind of detracts from the movie. But there’s nothing I can do. I just have to laugh it off. I can. Pretty much. Because I take my work seriously but I can’t take myself too seriously. I’m in such a crazy privileged position—shit, this is the pinnacle of the dream when I was 17.... Nobody wants to hear really how difficult it is."

Let’s consider a remarkable interview with him in The Sunday Times, a British newspaper known for a reasonably high tone and sturdy standards. Much of the article is about Fassbender’s anatomy, sex life, and sexual history, and in the published version he is depicted as someone willingly engaged in the back-and-forth. At one point he is quoted as blurting out, unexpectedly, "When in doubt, fuck." It also includes a statement near the end from the interviewer, Camilla Long, that I believe is without precedent even in the giddy history of the celebrity profile:

I...feel quite certain that he would willingly show me his penis, given slightly different circumstances and a bucket of champagne.

"Wow," says Fassbender when I recite this to him. "No, I haven’t read that one. Just as well, really." But he does remember the interview. "The first thing she said to me was, ’So, what does it feel like to have a big cock?’ That was her opening question."

And as for her bold assertion about what he might’ve done?

"I don’t think I would touch her with a barge pole."

A blunt answer. Though, I wince to point out, one with its own phallic innuendo. That’s the trouble. As schoolboys of a certain age know, once it’s on your mind there’s barely a sentence that can break free of it.

Setting aside the totality of what Fassbender does in Shame, there is one moment where I thought: "I’m not sure I’ve ever sat in the cinema and watched someone do that." It is not where he is facing toward the camera, naked. It is when you see him actually piss.

"I know," he says. Usually for movie pissing the liquid you see is actually coming from a hidden tube, but he was nude. For the first two takes, he wasn’t able to do anything, but he announced on-set before the third that it would happen, and it did. "Actually pretty proud," he says. And then he laughs and says—more blurts out, really—"That peeing cost me an Oscar."

He is not entirely serious. Nor will he endorse Steve McQueen’s slightly broader stated view: "In America they’re too scared of sex, that’s why he wasn’t nominated." "I don’t know—I don’t think so," says Fassbender. "Steve is a passionate man. There’s not much filtering with Steve, and I love him for that." But he’s starkly honest in acknowledging that there was a concerted campaign to get him nominated—"They promised me paradise!" he blares—and how his expectations were raised.

"At the beginning people [say], ’You’re going to be going to the Oscars,’ and you’re like, ’Whatever, doesn’t matter, don’t think so.’ But after a while it does penetrate. After a while you’re like, ’Anyway, so I’m going to the Oscars...’ " He laughs. "And you start to believe it. And I did. I thought I was going. And then I found out I wasn’t and I was upset. I was very upset by it. The first reaction was ’What the fuck...?’ " He sounds frustrated that he had let himself get sucked in. "It’s a vanity thing. It does become important to you. And it shouldn’t." On reflection, he decided that he had learned something about misplaced priorities. "A good little lesson."

Ridley Scott first noticed Fassbender in Hunger and Fish Tank. "Probably one of the best three or four actors out there," says Scott. "He holds the screen." Fassbender plays an android in Prometheus, and when the two met to discuss how he might approach the role, Scott asked him to look at three movies. Most superficially The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which David Bowie plays an alien visitor whose lack of belonging eats away at him. More important were Lawrence of Arabia and the wonderful 1963 film The Servant, in which Dirk Bogarde plays a manservant to a rich, aimless Englishman. Scott says that Fassbender phoned him shortly after watching The Servant and said, "I get it, I get it—I’m the butler." Though I will see an impressive dozen or so minutes of Prometheus, mostly taken from early on in the movie, details about the film are closely guarded; anyone prone to speculation, however, might find it significant that The Servant is a masterful depiction of hiring someone to control the little details of your life only to discover one day that one of the things your employee is controlling is you.

Peter O’Toole’s depiction of Lawrence of Arabia is also a background influence on how the android David might behave. "He’s an outsider as well," says Fassbender. "In the end, [Lawrence is] neither British nor Arab. There’s something in that, I think—the robot not being accepted by any of the humans." More unusually, the film itself—Lawrence of Arabia—also became an actual part of this new movie. Scott and Damon Lindelof, the movie’s screenwriter (and previously one of the minds behind Lost), had been discussing what an android might do in the empty years on a spaceship traveling huge distances while the human crew slept. Teach himself every skill, no doubt. "I reckon he can probably speak sixteen languages...play violin...piano..." says Scott. Watch every movie, too.

But then it struck them that maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would find one movie that he liked more than all the others, and fixate upon it. "We were talking about how young children, 4- or 5-year-olds, will watch the same movie over and over again," says Lindelof. "And you’ll say to them, ’There are other movies...’ And they say, ’No, I want this one.’ " What if this android watched Lawrence of Arabia over and over? What if he even decided to style his appearance on O’Toole’s? What if he even sometimes used borrowed dialogue? (Cinephiles quickly spotted that a line of David’s which momentously closes the Prometheus trailer—"Big things have small beginnings"—comes from Lawrence of Arabia.)

Fassbender embraced this fully. "I had Lawrence of Arabia on a loop in my room throughout filming," he says. "Jesus, I watched it so many times." Obsessive repetition is an integral part of his working method. When he is preparing for a movie, he will read the script over and over, day after day, until he has read it around three hundred times. This is often no more fun than it sounds—"It’s fucking boring!" he clarifies—but it helps him to the place where, ironically, once the camera is rolling, he feels liberated to go wherever his instinct takes him.

Fassbender also dutifully adopted the Peter O’Toole-esque hairstyle required, albeit with less enthusiasm. "Perfect for the character," he notes, but as Michael Fassbender he hated it. "I don’t think peroxide-blond hair is a beneficial look for me," he says. "I just looked at myself and I was like, ’Five-pound rent boy.’ " (Or, translated into American: $8 male prostitute.)

Lindelof says that once Fassbender had been cast as David, the script-in-progress actually evolved with that in mind: "There’s an element of danger to him, and an element of secrecy. Everything I’ve seen him do, no matter how loving and sweet and romantic he can be, there is just this compelling sense of: This guy has something to hide. Fundamental empathy is the actor’s greatest tool, to make the person in the audience say, ’I am that person.’ Michael Fassbender does not always do that. He is okay with, and comfortable with, and confident with saying, ’I will not allow you to feel empathy with me. There is a part of me that I am going to keep to myself. And if you try to get close you will find my hand in your face.’ "

A few weeks after our London afternoon, we meet for lunch in New York. In the meantime, Fassbender has appeared at a comic-book convention in Anaheim, California, to promote Prometheus, and met with the scriptwriter for the next X-Men movie in Los Angeles to discuss what is in store for Magneto, and he has flown up to Sacramento, where his sister now lives, to surprise his parents. It was a joint early birthday party for his father and for him—his thirty-fifth.

In New York, he orders a double espresso and puzzles over unfamiliar pastas on the menu. What he wants—what he most loves to eat after waking up—is oysters. Think of this not as the newly acquired fancy-pants tastes of the international film star, but as those of a boy with a chef father who grew up with access to private areas of a fine restaurant. Oysters are not on the menu here but he is not deterred. "Any good kitchen," he confidently announces, "should be stocked up in oysters, shouldn’t they?"

He asks the waitress whether they have any oysters. They do not.

He renews his study of the menu. He orders the shaved-porchetta sandwich and announces that we will share some pasta first. "I’ll play mama," he says when it arrives, and divides it up. He mentions that he has recently started cooking again. "If there’s friends around, I’ll cook. Or if I have a girlfriend. But on my own I kind of fell out of the habit of it, and it’s a shame really because I know it’s good for me. It’s something quite therapeutic."

During an earlier stop in New York, he was photographed walking the streets of SoHo hand in hand with his Shame co-star Nicole Beharie. Fassbender has tended to keep quiet about his romantic life, though not long ago he briefly reflected on the discovery that his new fame comes with "a buffet of choice." After the photos of Beharie and him appeared, the global gossip media anointed her as his girlfriend.

In this instance their assumptions are accurate. "I’m seeing Nicole, we’re trying to see each other as often as possible," he acknowledges. "That’s kind of difficult when she lives [in New York] and I live in England." He says they got together during the film’s promotion. "Nothing happened while we were filming. We started talking more on the promotion thing. So, yeah, it just sort of unfolded like that." Presumably that’s why he’s now back in New York for a couple of days, though he doesn’t say so.

What he does express is just how much, during our meal, he is increasingly frustrated by the overattentiveness of the waiters. Repeatedly he has to explain that no, thank you, he would not like his plate taken yet. This seems to disturb them as much as their actions are disturbing him. "What’s going on, man?" he eventually exclaims to a man loitering anxiously a few feet away. "You make me nervous when you hover around like that." Fassbender rails to me about this newly fashionable habit of taking away anyone’s plates before everyone has finished. "One of my pet hates," he says. Without reading too much into a moment or two’s irritation, not even unjustified, it may be a pointer. Fassbender presents himself as breezily carefree and upbeat—David Cronenberg’s description to me of his demeanor on-set while filming A Dangerous Method is as "annoyingly cheerful"—but my sense is that there is also another Fassbender, one much more tightly wound, whose frustrations and ambitions and insecurity bubble away in darkness, biding their time.

Today, though, the charmer is mostly in command. He’s funny talking about his successes, and funnier still talking about the moments that have not gone as planned. When he mentions Centurion, a disastrous sub-Gladiator misfire, he mutters "that Criterion classic." In this spirit, just before he leaves I ask him about a cameo that I read he’d filmed in a Woody Allen movie, Cassandra’s Dream. As he describes the experience, he mentions he’s never seen the movie. It’s only then that I realize he doesn’t know he was cut out of it, and that I’m about to break the news. "Oh shit," he says equitably. He tells an embarrassing story about how he wanted to say good-bye to Allen at the end of his single day’s shoot, and how he headed after the departing director calling out "Woody! Woody!" But Allen disappeared without turning around, leaving Fassbender with nothing to do but redirect to the craft table, pour a cup of coffee, and try to pretend that’s what he had been planning to do all along. "A really sad moment," he says.

Last summer, after Prometheus wrapped, at the end of twelve months of back-to-back filmmaking, Fassbender took a six-week motorcycle trip through Europe: he and an old school friend on one bike, his father, Josef, on another, a trip that had been talked about for over ten years. Three bike bos from the trip remain stacked up in the living room of his London apartment. To Fassbender the bos are not just a reminder of a happy time, they also represent a simpler way of being: "When I came back I was ’I need to live my life out of three bos. It’s perfect. It’s all I need.’ "

After they got home, Fassbender’s mother, Adele, called him. "What have you done to your father?" she asked. He was grumpy. Not the same.

"I miss the road," his father told him. "I miss the action. I’m cleaning out the gutters at the moment."

One of his father’s replacement activities, so it seems, is to follow his son’s mushrooming fame via Google Alert. That is how Fassbender learns much of what is being said about him. A call will come in. Sometimes there are important issues that need addressing. As Fassbender tells me when we meet in New York, "My dad was like, "What’s this about some fan vomiting on your shoes?’ "

In a sane and stable world, this would be a hypothetical example but, surreally, it is not. Since we first met in London, a story had appeared that a starstruck woman was so overcome by meeting Fassbender in a pub near his home that she threw up all over his shoes. A "source" was quoted in one of the British tabloids saying, "He was a bit bemused by his latest encounter and brushed off the vomit and played it cool. He used to be a barman so he’s no stranger to mopping up some sick." Fassbender was particularly surprised by this story (when it was published, friends were sending him texts saying things like "vomit?") for a very specific reason. "I wasn’t there for it," he says. "It just didn’t happen. What are you going to do?"

It was also reported that he got thrown out of his own party following the British premiere of A Dangerous Method. "Another lie," he says. At least he really was there, but he insists that he left of his own accord at 9:45 p.m. "I left early! I suppose ’Michael Fassbender leaves party early’ isn’t as good." In this instance, he seems to take the story as an insult to the times when he has actually succeeded in being ejected: "I have been thrown out of parties, and it’s a different scene than what was photographed that night, I can tell you."

And then there was the biggest Fassbender story of the past few weeks, the joke that never stops, coming round one more time. It was the evening after the comic-book convention in Anaheim, and as usual, his father got in touch: "I see there’s some stuff on the Internet..."

On this occasion the instigator was his Prometheus co-star Charlize Theron. That very afternoon she had spoken to me about him in terms loaded with respect: "The bottom line is, Michael Fassbender is probably the most talented actor that I’ve ever been around, and I think the most talented actor of this time right now.... I cannot talk about Shame because I sound like a fucking freak, but it’s a film that stayed with me for three weeks. His performance haunted me. I watched it twice, and when I look at the nuance, the delicacy, the tenderness, there was nothing heavy-handed about him. He knows what the balance is. He knows real life, he doesn’t know pretend life.... The bottom line is that he should have an Oscar on his mantel right now."

The same evening, Fassbender introduced Theron at a Human Rights Campaign gala in downtown Los Angeles, where she was accepting an award for her humanitarian work. He kept it simple: After a quick apology for being underdressed (jeans, white shirt, leather jacket) and a "Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everybody!" (he came onstage with a tumbler of what appeared to be whiskey), he knelt on one knee to present her with her award. He then retreated to the back of the stage and she took the lectern.

Faced with a restless crowd to entertain and the knowledge that an attractive movie actress talking the right kind of dirty rarely fails—and with the eternal modern alibi that it was all for a very good cause—Theron took the low road with impressive verve. Some words of thanks to her presenter segued into an appreciation of Shame. "As an actor," she started, "I have to say I was truly impressed that you chose to play it big. [laughter] I mean, most other actors would have gone small, trust me. [more laughter] No, I know, because I’ve worked with most of them... [more laughter] No, seriously_ [a nice fake so that the audience now expects sincere human-rights chatter]_...your penis was a revelation. I am available to work with it anytime."

He tells me that from where he was standing he could hear the laughter but couldn’t really hear the words. "I should have known, to be honest," he reflects. "You know, she’s pretty mischievous, and she’s got a pretty filthy mouth. Yeah, I should have been prepared, really. I wasn’t, stupidly enough."

Afterward, Theron said to him, "I hope you don’t mind me making a joke about your penis."